The present invention relates to data storage systems, and more particularly, this invention relates to accessing files stored on magnetic tape using block grouping.
In magnetic storage systems, magnetic transducers read data from and write data onto magnetic recording media. Data is written on the magnetic recording media by moving a magnetic recording transducer to a position over the media where the data is to be stored. The magnetic recording transducer then generates a magnetic field, which encodes the data into the magnetic media. Data is read from the media by similarly positioning the magnetic read transducer and then sensing the magnetic field of the magnetic media. Read and write operations may be independently synchronized with the movement of the media to ensure that the data can be read from and written to the desired location on the media.
An important and continuing goal in the data storage industry is that of increasing the density of data stored on a medium. For tape storage systems, that goal has led to increasing the track and linear bit density on recording tape, and decreasing the thickness of the magnetic tape medium. This has also led to increases in storage capacity for magnetic tapes as a whole. However, the development of small footprint, higher performance tape drive systems has created various challenges ranging from the design of tape head assemblies for use in such systems to actually accessing data stored on a magnetic tape.
For instance, the process of reading multiple files from different locations on a magnetic tape involves repositioning the magnetic head between the various physical locations that the files are stored. Conventional processes have performed these read operations such that the files are accessed in an order which corresponds to how the files themselves relate to each other. For example, File A is accessed first, File B is accessed second, File C is accessed third, etc. However, accessing files in this manner is often inefficient because of the repeated movements that are performed in order to seek the beginning of each file on the tape. Moreover, as the number of files being accessed increases, the amount of head repositioning performed by these conventional processes increases as well.